The 3 biggest benefits Brokers expect from Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is poised to dramatically change how real estate brokerages promote their listings and their agents and ultimately improve their marketing effectiveness, according to the most recent Thought Leader Survey that Imprev conducted.

More than 200 leading real estate franchises and independent brokerages, who collectively handled more than one-third of all U.S. residential real estate transactions last year, were polled and asked: “Which benefits would you expect to receive from Marketing Automation?”

The top three benefits identified clearly explain the rapid growth in Marketing Automation for Real Estate:

Knowing that their agents are staying in touch with past clients

Knowing that every listing is being fully marketed

Knowing which marketing works and which does not

Let’s look at each of these more closely.

Know their agents are staying in touch with past clients

Most real estate agents typically have challenges in staying in touch with past clients. Most agents are not top producers and don’t have a team or a staff that can manage their marketing. These agents must create and distribute whatever they use to stay in touch with their clients, whether they are generating a market update report, sending an email, postcard or letter or just picking up the phone and calling a past client, and that takes time – time that an agent is more likely to spend on a current transaction.

Enter Marketing Automation. Email campaigns that provide relevant content based on client attributes (location, age, etc.), allows every agent to stay top-of-mind with their customers. And once agents understand the benefits of Marketing Automation, it has the side benefit of motivating them to get their contacts organized. Centralizing contacts from Outlook, Gmail, smartphones, and a mailing list tucked away in a file drawer ensures that agents stay in touch with their complete book of business.

Know every listing is being fully marketed

Again, agents get busy. Sometimes they are able to spend a few hours creating a new flyer and a just Listed eCard or pulling together and posting a single property website and a video for YouTube.

But it’s probably a safe bet to assume that most agents do not do all of this for every listing – even though they may have committed to it in their listing presentation. But that’s the beauty of Marketing Automation for real estate listings. The agent doesn’t need to lift a finger – everything he or she needs to create and promote a listing through all the major channels is done automatically and usually less than 24 hours after the listing is posted on the MLS or into their brokerage’s CRM.

Knowing which marketing works and which do not

This could well be the greatest long-term benefit Brokers can get from Marketing Automation. That’s because few are currently able to accurately quantify the effectiveness of their marketing efforts for promoting themselves and their listings.

Marketing Automation helps solve this problem for real estate Brokers because it leverages online marketing channels, all of which offer detailed metrics that can deliver very precise measurement of traffic and online consumer behavior. They can also inform which promotional materials engage and which do not. This will allow brokers and agents to adjust and improve the effectiveness of their marketing as automation delivers new transparency and insight.

As you can see, each of these benefits are strong motivating factors that are driving more and more forward looking brokerages to adopt Marketing Automation.

To learn about the different ways real estate brokerage firms can use marketing automation, just email me at bill.yaman@imprev.com. Results from the recent marketing automation research are available for free in this report here.